Sri Lanka's war

In blood steeped

The feared carnage comes to pass

IT IS too late to warn of a civilian slaughter in north-eastern Sri Lanka. The “bloodbath [predicted] has become a reality,” said the UN's spokesman in Colombo on May 11th, as news of the latest atrocity emerged from the crowded beach where the army and Tamil Tiger rebels are fighting their last battle. On May 9th and 10th 480 civilian refugees are reported to have been brought dead or dying to a makeshift hospital in the war-zone, victims of shellfire. A bigger number are alleged to have been buried uncounted in the sand. On May 12th and 13th the hospital itself was shelled, and around 100 people killed, according to doctors working there. The UN considers their testimony to be “consistently reliable”.

APWhere there's smoke, there's a no-fire zone

According to the UN's cautious estimate, over 8,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting since January 20th. It does not apportion blame for this. But Human Rights Watch (HRW), a research and lobbying group, accuses the Tigers of holding hostage the inhabitants of their former northern fief—and murdering some who tried to flee. And it says the army has “indiscriminately shelled densely populated areas, including hospitals, in violation of the laws of war.” Analysis of satellite images of the war-zone, cited by HRW, reveals that a thickly populated patch of the beach was somehow cleared between May 6th and May 10th. Analysts say the more recent images depict at least 19 possible shell-holes.

The government's response to these allegations is dispiriting. It has lodged a complaint against the UN's spokesman, Gordon Weiss. And it has reissued its allegation that the Tigers are shelling their own Tamil brethren in an effort to spur international calls for a ceasefire, which America, Britain and other Western countries have been requesting for weeks. The accusation is not implausible. Throughout a bitter, 26-year conflict, the Tigers have never balked at killing their own people. Yet this explanation has always seemed inadequate, with the government privately admitting to having sometimes shelled the “no-fire zone”, an area of the battlefield it declared as a sanctuary for entrapped refugees, of whom perhaps 50,000 remain. Under unprecedentedly heavy assault, most of the remaining Tigers retreated into this area early last month, and the army invaded it. The total battlefield, a sandy spar between a deep lagoon and the Indian Ocean, is now around 6.5 square kilometres (2.5 square miles).

To rally its domestic support, the government has been predicting imminent victory for months, while its lackeys deride its foreign critics as Tiger-strokers and imperialists. Meanwhile, the army is also suffering. When the government last admitted its casualties, late last year, it said 3,800 troops had been killed in an 18-month offensive. Its casualty-rate has since been much higher. P.D. Gnanawathie, a migrant to Colombo from central Sri Lanka, where the army has recruited heavily, laments the mounting number of dead youths from her village. According to the army, over 20,000 Tiger fighters have been killed. In Vavuniya, where most of the 170,000 Tamil fugitives from the war-zone have been interned in government-run camps, field-hospitals are swamped with the wounded. A Western doctor there says he has seen suffering worse than he witnessed in Congo and Sudan.

Foreign condemnation of its means serves only to harden the resolve of President Mahinda Rajapaksa's government to achieve its end, the crushing of the Tigers. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, the president's brother and defence secretary, says the fighting will go on until the rebels, now estimated at just a few hundred seasoned fighters, have been destroyed. Above all, the government wants to wipe out the senior Tigers, including Velupillai Prabhakaran, a vicious supremo it reckons to be still alive and on the battlefield. A ceasefire, it fears, would allow him to wriggle free.

Moreover, the government argues, most Sri Lankans—meaning primarily the ethnic-Sinhalese majority that elected it—support its war-plan. Mr Rajapaksa's ruling coalition has won a series of regional elections, most recently in Western Province, the country's richest, on April 25th. But as the death-toll rises, and the war drags on, even this constituency is getting impatient. According to Mr Rajapaksa, the defence secretary, most Sri Lankans want the government “to finish this damn thing off soon”. In this mood, calls for restraint are unlikely to sway the army.